Use case: I want to mirror a bunch of repositories of a project. I suppose this would be pretty easy with a script.
But to the git part: I fear that the developers might force push things and thus revert commits and de facto delete code.
Is there a way to git clone and auto-checking out to a different branch or something else, to avoid force pulling and reverting commits?
Mirroring is exactly that: a copy
If the thing you are mirroring does something you don’t like, you can’t stop. Literally imagine standing in front of a mirror and trying to stop the reflection from doing something you don’t like. Not happening.
The thing about git is that it keeps all history, even in a force push situation, unless they actively clear previous history, which is… difficult.
What you can do is lag proxy whatever the main branch is to catch it in time, or just keep revisions of your mirror that you script and tag yourself. It’s like a daily backup you can go back and look into.
It’s going to waste a ton of space and time, but it would effectively create a stop-loss on someone nuking history, which generally is just not a thing that people do because it’s entirely stupid.
Great answer on the whole, but worth noting that both Git’s standard CLI client and most hosted git services do run periodic GC to prune dangling commits.
I second the suggestion to take periodic snapshots of your mirror. Because the majority of file contents will not be changing over time, you can make these snapshots very disk-space efficient by taking binary diffs of the tar’d repo using rdiff or the like.
True, I can do that with btrfs snapshots
Pruning clears cached blobs and unlinked objects. It 100% will not clear history unless you’re forcing a specific depth to be achieved, which, again, is not something that people who want a functional repo would do.
Dangling commits are unlinked objects, and happen pretty frequently if you’re using hard resets instead of explicit
git reverts.Not arguing that it’s good practice but it’s very common.